Jeremy Leyland, who lived for fifteen years at Beltichbourne, Drogheda has died at Norwich in England at the age of 68. He was a highly talented painter and writer who produced eight critically acclaimed novels.
Jeremy Leyland came from a Huguenot family that had settled in Ireland in the sixteenth century and his family had been in business in County Louth for over a hundred years. In 1945 his father had the unfortunate distinction of being the one of the last Allied soldiers to be killed on the very day that World War two ended.
Jeremy's unusual talent in both art and creative writing was discovered and encouraged at Wellington School by perceptive master. He went on to the Slade School of Art in London where he was a contemporary of such painters as Euan Uglow and David Story, who later, like Jeremy became a novelist. He also became friendly with the elderly L.S Lowry.
In his final year at the Slade he inherited a farm and a large ugly Victorian house at Beltichbourne from a great Uncle. He set about farming with enthusiasm and is reputed to have ploughed one of the straight furrows ever seen in County Louth. But for all his efforts he was no match for the vagaries of the Irish pig industry and wisely abandoned farming and returned to painting. He began a series of abstracts and portraits of great merit but with a wife and two young children to support he was drawn instead to making a living by writing.
His first novel A River Decrees which was given a splendid window display at Schwers Bookshop in Shop Street chronicled the break up of a marriage during a cruise on the River Shannon. Its critical success - the Guardian described as "writing like an angel , though an eccentric one" - encouraged him to attempt a more ambitious novel, Lirri, about the emotional life of a young woman caught up in the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland.
This and his subsequent works The Jonah, Bluff and The Tower and a volume of short stories, The Last Sandcastle revealed his unusual interest in exploring female motivation and on the impact of a woman of action on the life of a socially isolated man. The sexual explicitness of his early novels provoked the wrath of the late Monsignor McKevitt of Termonfeckin, a member of the State censorship board and Jeremy engaged in a lengthy and amusing dispute with him in the Irish press.
In 1971, he moved to England where he made ends meet by letting rooms to students who he treated more as house guests than paying tenants.
Recognising that there was little dramatic material in his own life he decided to work as a part-time counsellor at his local Citizen's Advice Bureau in Norwich. Here he met people with real difficulties and by proxy became involved in the dramas and disputes of their lives.
This proved to be rich material for him as novelist and his last two novels A Marked Woman and Voices show a new realism in his work based on first-hand experiences.
But he never lost his fascination with Ireland and the Co Louth coast in particular which features in much of his work.
A memorial service will be held at St Peter's Church, Church of Ireland, on Tuesday October 9th, at 6.30 p.m. and later at Beltichbourne.
T.A.